Breaking down the question
The statement claims that a specific process — the movement of land from those who till it to owners who do not — is transforming Indian society, and it asks you to justify this with suitable illustrations. The command word Justify signals broad agreement: your job is to defend the proposition with reasoning and, crucially, with examples.
The conceptual core is the split between the cultivating owner, who works his own land, and the non-cultivating owner, an absentee landlord, investor or urban professional who owns land but hires labour or leases it out. When land drifts from the former to the latter, agrarian class relations, the countryside's link to the wider economy, and rural social identity all shift. The word illustrations is a direct instruction to supply concrete instances. The note on agrarian social structure and land reforms supplies the wider context.
How to approach it
Open by unpacking the two categories of owner and stating agreement with the thesis. Then justify through a sequence of transformations — in class structure, in the nature of farming, in labour relations, and in rural-urban ties — attaching an illustration to each. Close with a balanced line acknowledging that the trend is uneven. Keep it tight; this is a 10-mark answer.
Model answer
The statement points to a significant structural shift in rural India. A cultivating owner is one who owns and personally works the land; a non-cultivating owner holds land but does not till it, relying instead on hired labour, tenants or sheer investment. When land passes from the former to the latter, several transformations follow, which justify the claim that Indian society is being reshaped.
The first transformation is in the agrarian class structure. As indebted or marginal peasants lose land — through distress sales, mortgage default or acquisition — and it accumulates in the hands of moneylenders, traders, rich urban buyers and corporate interests, the countryside sees a process of de-peasantisation. The former cultivating owner is pushed down into the ranks of agricultural labour or migrant work. Daniel Thorner's classic categories of maliks, kisans and mazdoors help capture this downward slide, as cultivators are converted into wage workers on land they once owned.
The second transformation is in the very character of farming and labour. Non-cultivating owners often lease land back to the poor through what is called reverse tenancy, or run it as a commercial, profit-driven enterprise with hired labour rather than family labour. Béteille's study of Sripuram showed how ritual rank, land control and economic power were pulling apart; the entry of non-cultivating owners accelerates this by making landholding an economic investment detached from the older ritual and caste basis of village dominance. Utsa Patnaik's writings on the differentiation of the peasantry likewise trace how such concentration deepens agrarian inequality.
The third transformation is in the relationship between village and wider economy. When urban professionals, businessmen and even non-resident Indians buy farmland, agriculture is drawn into circuits of urban capital and speculation, and land values respond to real-estate pressures near expanding towns. This loosens the age-old identity between the cultivator and the soil, weakens attachment to the land as a way of life, and turns it into a tradable asset — a profound cultural shift in a society where land ownership long defined status and security.
These illustrations justify the statement. At the same time, the trend is uneven: land reform legislation, tenancy protections and the persistence of small family farms mean that the transformation is neither complete nor uniform across regions. Its direction, however, is clear — the transfer of land to non-cultivating owners is reworking agrarian classes, the organisation of production and the meaning of land itself.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner expects the candidate to grasp the cultivating versus non-cultivating distinction at once and to treat Justify as a cue for a defended, example-rich answer. Scripts that stay abstract and never illustrate lose easy marks, because the question explicitly asks for illustrations.
Strong answers organise the justification around distinct transformations — class, production, rural-urban linkage — and pin an illustration or a named scholar to each, such as Thorner's agrarian categories or the notion of reverse tenancy. A closing acknowledgement that the process is uneven demonstrates balance. Within the short word limit, the discriminator is concrete, well-labelled evidence rather than a general lament about rural distress.